Tag Archive for: SelfDriving

Here’s How Ransomware Is Going To Fiendishly Impede AI Self-Driving Cars

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Ransomware is being continually mentioned in the daily news and appears to be a seemingly unstoppable fiendish craze.

Perhaps the recent attack of ransomware on the Colonial Pipeline received the most rapt attention since it led to concerns over gasoline shortages and caused quite a stir amongst the general public. When ransomware is used against a particular bank or hospital or school, this normally doesn’t have quite the same widespread disruption as did the fuel pipeline incident.

The thing is, we are probably going to see a lot more ransomware being fielded and doing so against all manner of businesses and governmental entities. Some would assert that we are only so far at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ransomware hacks.

Part of the reason why you can expect more use of ransomware is that it is relatively easy for an evildoer or crook to deploy the computer hacking scourge. Whereas the perpetrator used to need to have some keen computer nerdish skills, that’s pretty much not the case anymore. Sadly, the ease of attempting to infect computer systems with ransomware has become nearly easy-peasy and has opened the floodgates to just about any determined villain to try (ransomware programs can be cheaply purchased online via the so-called dark web). There are now plentiful Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) capabilities available that will do most of the heavy lifting for those that prefer a hands-off chauffeured form of ransomware cyberattacks.

As a point of clarification, not every use of ransomware is successful.

There are innumerable attempts that get rebuffed by cybersecurity protections or that are otherwise caught by alert computer security specialists. The rub is that the ransomware ploy only has to succeed one time, in the sense that if a malicious hacker tries a hundred different attempts at various entities, and only one of those takes hold, the crook still wins and the gambit was successful.

This is reminiscent of a popular catchphrase in the cybersecurity field, namely that the system protective measures need to be right all of the time, while the intrusion approaches only…

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Largest Ever Cyber Hack Provides Vital Lessons For Self-Driving Cars

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They say it is the largest ever cyber hack.

Unless you are living under a rock or inside an Internet-disconnected cave, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the recent cyber-attack encompassing an estimated 18,000 or more U.S. companies and governmental agencies, including notables such as a preponderance of Fortune 500 businesses, most of the top accounting firms, many of the top telecommunications entities, and a wide swath of federal departments such as Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce, and the military branches.

Some have referred to this sly cybersecurity breach as the most insidious and widespread in history (for my prior coverage about cyber-attacks, see the link here).

It is breathtaking in its scope and devilishly clever in its approach, and as a result, has caught many by utter surprise. On the one hand, it is not particularly a surprise that a massive scaled cyberattack has occurred since cyber protection experts have been warning about these possibilities for years on end. The surprise is that we didn’t know it was underway and that by size alone it presumably should have earlier been somehow detected. An itsy-bitsy cyber-attack might squeak through under the radar, while one that cuts across hundreds or thousands of organizations ought to have been sniffed out by either happenstance or by watchful oversight.

The real twist, some exhort, might be that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps there are other similar cyber-attacks already underway and we just haven’t ferreted those out as yet. Or new cyber breaches are being devised and for which when they are unleashed will be beyond breathtaking and veer into the full borne calamity and cyber catastrophic sphere.

In brief, here’s how the recent cyber trickery worked.

A tech company called SolarWinds provides networking-related software that is immensely popular and used by thousands upon thousands of companies and governmental agencies. The networking software in this case is known as Orion. To update the Orion software from time-to-time, SolarWinds pushes out various patches that are sent electronically, which then automatically get…

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Video shows Google self-driving car hitting bus

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You may have read recently that a Google self-driving car operating autonomously was being blamed for a collision with a bus on a busy road in Mountain View, Calif. Now the Associated Press has posted a video of the accident on YouTube, taken from various angles by cameras inside of the bus.

The video is not all that clear, but here goes:

My guess is the most serious consequence from this crash and video will involve the bus driver eating that sandwich.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Paul McNamara

Of course, you’ll still be able to drive Google’s self-driving car

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The Wall Street Journal reports the obvious:

Co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday that Google is open to self-driving cars that can also be driven manually, or switch between the two modes.

“I don’t think we’re going to see [a world with] no human drivers anytime soon,” Mr. Brin told reporters at Google headquarters. “And I think there’s always going to be pleasure in being able to hit the open road and enjoy that.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Paul McNamara